Devlin’s entrance is so abrupt that I jump out of my skin and drop the dough pusher thingy on the table with a clang. “Sorry! I didn’t hear you come in.”
“No worries. Hey, are those crinkle cookies?”
Lilly pats his shoulder. “They sure are.”
Devlin kisses her soft cheek. “You know these are my favorite. Blair, have you tried the dough?”
“No.”
“That’s the best part.”
Lilly swats at him. “Oh no you don’t!”
But she doesn’t try hard to stop him as Devlin pinches off a thumb-sized bite of dough, breaks it in half and hands it to me.
“Be warned, you’re eating raw eggs,” he lets me know.
“I’m warned,” I reply with a giggle.
Lilly throws up her hands in mock frustration, but there’s a spark of love in her eyes when she looks at Devlin. “You two. Get out of here if you’re going to eat all my dough.”
Devlin pops his into his mouth and grabs my hand. “You don’t mind if I steal her, do you, Gigi?”
“I don’t mind. She’s been help enough. Come back in fifteen minutes for cookies. Maybe Rebecca will show her face and keep me company while you’re gone.”
Devlin leads me from the kitchen and glances over his shoulder, grinning. “I can’t wait to show you what I discovered.”
23
It’s just like I saw in my vision. Devlin standing with a book, reading it, in the middle of his grandmother’s library.
“It’s right here.” He points to a paragraph. “It says that stabilization of any sort of magic in flux must have a way to be anchored, and it goes on to say”—his voice fills with excitement—“that the way to anchor it is to create an opposite effect.”
I fold my arms. “That’s a mouthful. But what does it mean?”
“It means that it needs to be grounded to the earth. Tied to the mother. That’s what. What I’m creating is a womb outside of the mother, so it must be tethered to her somehow.”
I frown. “But it can’t be physically tied to her. That defeats the purpose.” He shakes his head, because he’s already figured it out and is waiting for me to catch up. Then it hits me. “You mean it has to be tied to her mentally, psychically.”
He snaps his fingers. “Yes! That’s what we’ve been missing, and that’s easy enough to do. You remember how to tether magic to a person, right?”
“Oh yeah, that’s simple. You just create the connection. That can be done with a roping spell or even a potion.”
He grins from ear to ear. “See? I knew you were meant to be a potion master. This is it, Blair! The breakthrough that I’ve been waiting for.”
Devlin pulls me into a hug, and maybe it’s because of what I’ve learned about him, maybe it’s because it’s genuinely a great moment. I am happy for him, so I hug him back tightly, and his arms constrict around me, too. Not in an anaconda I’m-going-to-smother-you sort of way. This is different.
It’s full of feeling. It’s like all the anger and all the longing that I’ve been stowing away for literallyyearsunleashes. And I feel the same coming from him. His hug has got a thousandI’m sorrieswritten all over it, andif I could take things back, I would,but I’m happy where we are now, and for some really stupid reason, tears prick my eyes.
I will them to vanish and they do. Stupid tears.
Ever so slowly we pull away, and when I say slow, I mean this happens in super slow motion.
My cheek drags against his sandpapery one. His skin scrapes against mine, and his fingers curl into my forearms as our noses meet.
The air shifts. The feeling in the room becomes heavy as our lips line up. There’s this sudden change. It’s not like the other night when we made out.
This is different in a way that I can’t pinpoint.
